Washington Post Staff Writer U.S. Has Criticized Arab TV Network

Qatar Advances Plans To Privatize Al-Jazeera The public authority of Qatar is pushing forward with plans to privatize al-Jazeera, the famous and dubious Arab broadcasting company that has regularly gotten under the skin of U.S. organization authorities, an organization representative said. Subtleties of the arrangement are yet to be worked out and anticipate an attainability report that should be finished in coming months, said Jihad Ballout, a representative in the Qatari capital of Doha. Al-Jazeera is profoundly famous in the Arab world however has more than once drawn analysis from the Bush organization about its inclusion of the battle in Iraq and other hot-button issues in the Middle East. Weight from U.S. authorities has caused the public authority of Qatar, which bankrolls al-Jazeera, to quicken the side project, as indicated by a report yesterday in the New York Times, which cited an anonymous senior Qatari authority. Ballout said he has heard reports about such weight yet has no direct information on it. He said he knew about no endeavors to meddle with the organization's autonomy and underscored that al-Jazeera's code of morals disallowed it from surrendering to business or political weight. Ballout and a senior al-Jazeera columnist added that Qatar had consistently wanted to privatize al-Jazeera. At the point when the organization was set up in 1996, the unpleasant model was the BBC, which is bankrolled by the British government. The arrangement was for al-Jazeera to depend, following five years, on promoting dollars - a model nearer to CNN. In spite of the fact that the organization has prevailing with regards to picking up watchers - upwards of 40 million day by day - it has had restricted achievement in getting publicizing, generally in light of the fact that private partnerships in numerous Arab nations were reluctant to bankroll a media organization that as often as possible got under the skin of Arab governments, said Ballout and the senior al-Jazeera columnist. All things considered, in late 2003, Qatar reported it would start investigating approaches to privatize the organization. Weight from the U.S. government, the writer stated, was the final irritation that will be tolerated - however amusing, given the Bush organization's expressed craving to help vote based system and free media in the Middle East. "The very organization that is burning through huge number of dollars to have autonomous or free media in the district is partaking in the potential quieting of media simultaneously," said the columnist, who mentioned secrecy since all open remarks from the organization should come from Ballout. ----

---- Calls yesterday evening to the consulate of Qatar were not returned. State Department representative Noel Clay said yesterday that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had made the organization's situation on al-Jazeera clear. Despite the fact that U.S. authorities have showed up infrequently on the organization to contact its tremendous crowd, they have since quite a while ago grumbled that al-Jazeera's inclusion is politically incendiary and, on occasion, verifiably defective. Powell openly grumbled about al-Jazeera to the public authority of Qatar in April. As The Washington Post revealed, after Powell had "extremely extraordinary" conversations about the organization with the Qatari unfamiliar clergyman, Hamad Bin Jasim Thani, the priest stated: "I heard with incredible consideration what the U.S. organization needed to state about it. I am not straightforwardly included, yet I will positively convey it to the ideal individuals in Qatar." Ballout said that the analysis of the organization by senior U.S. authorities was "exceptional" and that, a long way from being one-sided, al-Jazeera had investigated untouchable themes and given an autonomous stage to assorted perspectives that had been absent from the Arab media. "By far most of the analysis of al-Jazeera has been politically roused," he said.